Spend This Christmas In the Cloud!

Spend This Christmas In the Cloud!

Christmas comes but once a year. But cloud computing brings us merry joy the whole year long. These two enormous forces in our community — the holidays and the ever-helpful cloud — will finally meet at a crossroads this Sunday.

Instead of dreaming about cloudy stocking stuffers, why not make your progressive technology dreams come to life for you this year? Here are three festive ways that cloud computing can upgrade your annual celebration from family-overkill bearable to fa-la-la-la beautiful.

Show Off Your Ugly Christmas Sweater!

How could it be Christmas without vacuuming away the mothballs from your prettiest, kitchiest holiday sweater? If you’re a true ghastly garment aficionado, cloud computing could help you win prizes for your ugly-awesome wardrobe. Young & Free St. Louis is staging an Ugly Sweater Contest via an ad hoc Facebook app. Snap a photo and upload it to the app’s cloud storage. A wince-worthy winner will be picked after December 22.

Buy Everything on Your Wish List — On the Cheap

Nothing aggravates me more about the holiday season than how easily I overspend. Sure, there’s tons of family and friends to spoil with cute presents. But it upsets me that bringing them joy means bringing my bank balance too close to zero, every year. Not this time, though! I’m using Pongr Beta, an application which stores pricing info for hundreds of great holiday items in its server. I simply snap a pic of the barcode for my favorite Christmas trinket, and Pongr pins down the best places for me to find it for as little dough as possible — either online or in a store. Wonderful!

Defeat the Gingerbread Man, Dodge the Eggnog

Dieters, duck! There is no more dangerous season for your physique than the fat-laden, carbs-packing, sedentary-lifestyle-celebrating tradition that is Christmas. If you’ve been a very good girl or boy this year, eating healthily in anticipation of holiday poundage, gorge away by all means. But I never make it off the naughty list; I eat sinfully the whole year through. This Christmas, however, I have a secret weapon: My Net Diary. The application maintains a food journal for me to track my calories. Its Instant Food Entry makes it so easy for me to add each of my Christmas meals to the app with a snap. The better to keep my holiday gluttony in check, and my mission for fitness on the rails.

Jeff Norman is a freelance writer currently based in New York City. He's moved into writing about cloud computing from substantial work in culture and the arts. He earned his undergraduate degree in English at Stanford and has studied at Oxford and Cambridge.

Recent

Surprising Facts and Stats – Online Security It’s easy to get lulled into a false sense of security when browsing the web. As more and more devices join the internet of things, the risk of becoming a victim of a criminal cyber gang is increasing – we have more unsecured access points and offer would-be…

World Backup Day: Understand The Data You Are Protecting Did you know that 113 phones are lost or stolen every minute? What about the fact that 1 in 10 computers are infected with a virus every month? Thanks to World Backup Day, an independent initiative that was started in 2011, awareness is being raised about…

The E-Learning Market We’ve talked a fair bit about e-Learning and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) technologies here on CloudTweaks over the past number of years. The industry is expected to continue to grow at a brisk pace as more and more firms and educational institutions start to adopt cloud based services. Docebo has an excellent…

Popular

Unusual Clandestine Cloud Data Centre Service Locations Everyone knows what the cloud is, but does everybody know where the cloud is? We try to answer that as we look at some of the most unusual data centre locations in the world. Under the Eyes of a Deity Deep beneath the famous Uspenski Cathedral in the…

Cloud Computing Education The benefits of cloud computing are being recognized in businesses and institutions across the board, with almost 90 percent of organizations currently using some kind of cloud-based application. The immediate benefits of cloud computing are obvious: cloud-based applications reduce infrastructure and IT costs, increase accessibility, enable collaboration, and allow organizations more flexibility…

5 Ways The Internet of Things Will Drive Cloud Growth The Internet of Things is the latest term to describe the interconnectivity of all our devices and home appliances. The goal of the internet of things is to create universal applications that are connected to all of the lights, TVs, door locks, air conditioning, and…

The Hot Seat Five cloud questions every CIO needs to know how to answer The cloud is a powerful thing, but here in the CloudTweaks community, we already know that. The challenge we have is validating the value it brings to today’s enterprise. Below, let’s review five questions we need to be ready to address…

Sponsored Posts

The Intelligent Tattoo I’ve got you under my skin: the rise of the intelligent tattoo As the Internet of Everything expands its reach to embrace many new areas of life, the race continues to develop more robust and accessible tools. Wearables are being whittled down from clunky watches to smart clothes and wrist bands, but…

Cloud Logo Sponsors

Contributor Spotlight

Established in 2009, CloudTweaks is recognized as one of the leading influencers in cloud computing, big data and internet of things (IoT) information. Our goal is to continue to build our growing information portal, by providing the best in-depth articles, interviews, event listings, whitepapers, infographics and much more.